How Great Leaders Build Trust With 4 Brain-Based Tools

I write about leveraging neuroscience to create remarkable leadership.

Recently one of my executive coaching clients came to me with this question.

“Christine, my team is disengaged and disconnected. I am being drained daily by high stress, high distrust and chaos. How can I get my team to trust my company and to trust me?”

The issue of trust can make or break an organization. According to Harvard Business Review: “People crave transparency, openness, and honesty from their leaders. Unfortunately, business leaders continue to face issues of trust. According to a survey by the American Psychological Association, one in four workers say they don’t trust their employer, and only about half believe their employer is open and upfront with them.”

90% of our decisions of our behaviors are driven by our emotional brain. This means we are highly emotional beings driven by deep subconscious patterning. When we learn how to tap in and connect to deep subconscious patterning and how to give people what they truly crave at subterranean levels we get peak performing teams that trust us and trust their organization.

How do we get team members who say ‘I love my job, I trust my leader and l’m ready to rock today!’

What happens when we have a culture that is full of fear, stress and confusion? Our team does not experience safety, belonging and mattering therefore a culture of trust can’t exist. How do we move through a culture of fear towards a culture of trust? We use some pretty cool and practical neuroscience-based tools and techniques. Let’s dive in.

Is Your Team Engaged?

Ask yourself, how engaged is your team? Engagement is directly related to trust. One of the easiest ways to assess your team is to have them participate in an Employee Engagement Survey twice a year. Be sure to make cultural changes based on the answers they give you.

Have them answer questions that are based around safety, belonging, mattering.

Make sure that they can add comments and that their anonymity is protected. Your team won’t answer honestly if they feel that their answers could come back to haunt them in the form of losing their job.

Compare how engaged you ‘think’ your tribe is vs the feedback you receive.

This experience is very telling and uncovers blind spots which open the door towards putting processes in place to increase team engagement. There are 4 categories of neuroscience-based tools that will help you.

As leaders, our companies exist to make people’s lives easier. We provide products and services that make people’s lives better and that solve problems. But a funny thing happens when our teams don’t feel connected. Productivity decreases, our teams become disengaged and our profits plummet. Creating a culture that is engaged that trusts their leader isn’t as cosmic as it seems, there is a formula.

Shared Identity + Profound Meaning = Tribe = Trust

Trust creates reliable environments. Enriched environments are more reliable. Reliable and enriched environments equal ROI. A more enriched, interactive tribal environment is good for the brain and good for the business. What do we mean by enriched? This environment is interactive, stimulating which increases the surface area of brain cells. The result? Team members making more connections, solving problems faster, figuring things out faster and innovating better.

A brain in a more reliable (trust their leader) and enriched (stimulating) environment will have more branches. More branches equal more surface area which equals more connections which equals more meaning (personalizing things around you). This graphic is a great representation of what that looks like.

The people make the revenue happen. The people make the business model happen.

I've lived many lives: serial entrepreneur, technology and CEO advisor, venture capitalist, engineer in the early days of Microsoft. Today I help CEOs in rapid growth and turnaround scenarios to achieve previously unheard of results through seeing into their blind spots, ali...